By Matt Kuhrt
For many physicians, there's no more baffling perennial struggle than the current one involving vaccinations. With appeals to herd immunity and hard science proving an uphill battle, some communities have opted to take the path of least resistance and simply tolerate anti-vaccination stances. As the anticipated dangers of this stance play out in the form of outbreaks of preventable diseases, Jeffrey Kluger, editor-at-large for Time magazine, calls such tolerance a "losing strategy."
Specifically, he points to a recent varicella outbreak in a Melbourne, Australia, primary school where up to 25 percent of the student body has been afflicted after the vaccination rate sagged to 73.2 percent. On the whole, these types of outbreaks tend to push public opinion back in favor of vaccination. Kluger argues that the cost in terms of unnecessary illness (and, potentially, preventable deaths) among children raises a philosophical question with regard to exactly how much open societies ought to put up with "know-nothingism in the service of open-mindedness."
Given the amount of emotion and polarizing rhetoric around vaccination to begin with, it's easy to see how frustrations about new outbreaks of preventable, and in some cases previously controlled disease would fuel calls for less tolerance of anti-vaccination positions. The longer-term solution seems more likely to lie in understanding the reasons patients resist vaccines, and providing as much evidence-based information as possible in order to educate patients.
Education is a slow road, however, and one problem with simply presenting evidence lies in the ease with which it can be manipulated or misread, even in situations as relatively cut-and-dried as the Australia outbreak. The presence of immunized children among the cohort of varicella infections provides a means for anti-vaccination proponents to claim vaccines are ineffective, according to the article, despite evidence that those cases are milder, and that a level of efficacy just shy of 100 percent still covers a significant portion of the population.
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